In Data Transmission Networks, such as the Internet, information to be transmitted is often divided into segments. The information in each segment is combined with a header which includes source and destination addressing as well as control information. This combination of information is termed a “packet.” A packet is transmitted through the Internet or any type of Data Transmission Network and is either received at its destination or it is lost along the way. Some causes of packet loss include transmission line errors, collisions between packets, traffic overload at a packet store-and-forward node, traffic overload at a router, or buffer overload at the sending or receiving station. Delayed forwarding of packets may cause a packet to appear so late that it is regarded as lost.
A number of approaches have been developed in order to recover the lost information. In the Internet context, one approach is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for communications between hosts in packet switched Internet protocol networks. TCP recovers data that is damaged, lost, or duplicated or delivered out of order by assigning a sequence number to each OCTET(or Byte) and requiring a positive acknowledgment from the receiving side. If the acknowledgment is not received within a time out interval, the data is retransmitted. At the receiver, the sequence numbers are used to correctly order segments that may be received out of order and to eliminate duplicates. Damage of a packet is handled by adding a check sum to each segment transmitted, checking at the receiver, and discarding damaged segments.
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) was created to provided a datagram mode of communication between hosts in packet switched Internet protocol networks. Damage is handled by adding a check sum to each segment transmitted, checking at the receiver, and discarding damaged segments. UDP is transaction oriented, and delivery and duplicate protection are not guaranteed. The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is therefore not a suitable host-to-host protocol for certain applications, but it is possible to build a reliable host-to-host protocol on UDP.
The above described recovery systems do have drawbacks. With TCP, packet loss requires retransmission for recovery. In an Internet protocol network, packets may be lost due to congestion at any of multiple places in their journey from source to destination. When a transmission is restarted, it is restarted at the first segment which has not been acknowledged. This means that not only is the lost packet retransmitted, but all packets following the lost packet are also retransmitted. A significant portion of Internet traffic (the Internet being the largest example of an Internet protocol network), is made up of packets being retransmitted. The efficiency of systems which transmit information over the Internet is significantly impaired by the retransmission of these packets. Moreover, for certain streaming applications such as various audio and video transmissions where stream continuity is an important consideration, such retransmission based recovery systems are unreliable and can substantially impair transmission fidelity.